


Awakenings

by Splintered_Star



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Apocalypse, World of Ruin (Final Fantasy), canonical apocalypse, incomplete set
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:15:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28325934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splintered_Star/pseuds/Splintered_Star
Summary: Waking up alone in the world of ruin
Kudos: 11





	1. Edgar

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely intended to make this a complete set of all the characters. But then I got distracted and now it's a literal decade later. 
> 
> So I'm putting up what I've got. Enjoy.

Edgar wakes up in the desert with blood dried into what’s left of his coat and sand in his mouth. He’s alone and as far as he can see, there’s nothing but sand and sky.

The sky looks wrong.

But even the King of Figaro knows the desert better than his own castle, and a desert is a desert regardless, so he instinctually orients himself north and starts moving.

He flips his compass open, but it’s spinning uselessly.

A desert is a desert, but when the first monster attack leaves him running from twisted creatures that look like Kefka’s fever dreams, he begins to realize that the desert might not be his friend after all.

Nightfall breaks his heart.

The sky is blurring but the stars are stars and unchanged by whatever madness has been ravaged on Earth. The stars are untouched and something in him snaps as he realizes they are as familiar as his brother’s face, as familiar as the desert isn’t.

The desert leaves no landmarks on Earth, so his father taught him to navigate by the stars, beacons in the sky to mark one’s path. He knows these stars, knows this sky, but his home is nowhere to be seen.

This is his sky, but this isn’t his desert, and that’s when he beings to realize that whatever happened on that continent in the sky may have ruined the world more than any of them dared to fear.

Maybe it’s just him left. It’s easy to believe such things in the desert. Maybe Figaro is dead. That thought is almost as bad. A king with no kingdom, a man with no humankind – what difference is there?

Maybe he’s alone. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe is enough. He reorients himself towards where South Figaro would be, and keeps walking.


	2. Relm

Relm remembers, fuzzily, being licked by a dog’s tongue, a dog whining – remembers cloth-covered fingers on her face and the cool relaxation of a cure spell washing away the scrapes and bruises.

When she wakes, however, she is alone and on the outskirts of something that resembles a village. She stands, brushes dust and black-and-tan fur off of her coat (oh loyal Interceptor, you’ll get so many treats later) and looks around.

The colors are all wrong, and she shakes her head because her eyes are stinging – no, not just her eyes, her fingers too – her *magic* is burning, shifting and everything feels all *wrong* -

She curls up on the ground, her arms over her eyes. The burn fades slowly, and she mutters a curse against Kefka for whatever he did to fuck up the magic of the world so badly. The magic is there, just wrong, just different somehow, running and carving new channels under her skin.

….gramps is okay. He’s got to be. Even though his magic is even stronger – he’s gotta be okay.

He’s fine – she’ll find him. Stupid old man could never be left on his own anyway.

She hunches on the ground and she’s not crying, not worried. Just sore and tired and she sketches on the ground because that’s what she does, she always draws when she’s not-worried-damnit and she can’t begin to imagine where her sketchbook is. Except that it doesn’t look right either, the shapes aren’t coming out right, and she smudges it out in a huff.

Art was her magic. Is her magic. But it can’t be broken too. She wipes her eyes – not crying either – and stands. She’ll just keep drawing until it works again, and find that idiot old man too.


	3. Sabin

Sabin wakes, halfway down a mountain and halfway into a bush. He adjusts his grip and finds solid foot holds before he’s entirely conscious, solid support found without any mental command.

Duncan used to wake him by pushing him off a cliff. Some habits don’t fade.

He pulls himself up, footholds and handholds found by instinct – and when necessary, a solid punch to the rock to make one. It’s not long before reaches a plateau, a tiny flat spot of rock in the mountain. Sabin tests it for stability, and when it feels solid he thumps down on it with a huffed breath.

The air tastes strange.

He scrubs dust out of his eyes and stares out at the world from the mountainside. He blinks, because the world looks… different. He hasn’t seen a lot of maps, not since he left the castle – learn the ground, Duncan said, forget what paper says the area looks like and find out what the place is – but there were maps on the blackjack and he saw the shape of the land from the sky. The land in front of his eyes doesn’t match anything he’s seen before and –

He’s pretty sure he would have noticed a massive tower in the middle of *anywhere*. Not only is it new, it’s growing – bits of wreckage and ruin swarming into a single mass like a storm of swamp flies.

…somehow, Sabin knows – maybe it’s the gift of the espers, thrumming under his skin still – that Kefka is there, in the remains of the floating continent. Maybe the goddess statues too. To Terra and Celes, the place probably *glows*.

Huh. Wonder where they landed. They’re fine, of course, but what if they’re hurt – he knows, chuckling and rubbing his eyebrow with one hand, that either of them can kick his ass, but he grew up a prince, okay, and chivalry lasts when etiquette doesn’t.

Then again, Sabin was never that good at court life anyway.

…He bites his lip, because the memory of the court is tied up forever with the memory of one of a million official dinners, Edgar at his side, hissing, “No, the other fork!”

Edgar’s fine too. No way he isn’t.

But he’s probably worried – always the big brother, even if they intentionally forgot years ago which one of them is actually older. So Sabin stands, brushes the dust off of what remains of his pants, and starts down the mountain again.


	4. Setzer

The last thing Setzer remembers is the steering wheel breaking apart in his hands.

When he wakes, it to the broken wreckage of his ship lying around him like a splattered corpse, flames dying from where the engine burst and spread its fireblood across the grass.

He stands, unsteady and his knees buckling, and leans on beam impaled into the ground. There is blood in his mouth and he can feel the birth of a new set of scars on his face, and it only takes one blurry glance over his dismembered ship to know that there’ll be no saving her, this time.

He coughs over a sob, shivering with more than cold. He’d fixed his ship before, brought her back from what he thought were fatal blows, but. He almost sobs or laughs, one of the two – he doesn’t even have all the pieces. He can’t reassemble a corpse without half the limbs.

His hand trembles against the beam, and then he sees a flash of bright color in between fire and charred wood – he’s struck, again, and his legs move before he thinks. He trips, skids on as on his knees. A scrap of green fabric flutters in front of his face – heavy fabric, with woven in gold – a king’s cloak. There’s blood soaked into the edge and dirt smeared into the weave and it’s unmistakably Edgar’s coat.

Setzer thumps on the ground, staring at the scrap of fabric. There’s no noise around him except for the crackle of dying fires and the creak of slowly collapsing timbers. No groans or cries, not even of birds. No life, except for him.

He doesn’t remember searching for bodies, though he tries to believe he must have. The air is heavy with smoke and poison, and he doesn’t bother putting out the fires. Let this be the Blackjack’s funeral pyre. He’s half tempted to make it his, but he ends up staring at the flames for a long moment and finding that he just doesn’t have the guts.

Heh. He always was a coward. So he pats himself down, finds his flask unharmed, and takes a drink. Then the world doesn’t seem so bad, so he takes another.


	5. Terra

Terra wakes and immediately vomits onto the ground. 

Revulsion sweeps through her, the sensation of /wrongness/ shattering her perception for long moments. Some undercurrent to reality she had never consciously perceived before has been made violently apparent by its warping. Her skin flickers pink and red, flesh and plasma. Power flows out of her in waves, ripping grass and dirt from the ground. It feels like hours later when she - acclimates to whatever has happened to make the world feel so wrong. Magic has changed - 

Kefka, on the floating continent, pushing the goddesses out of balance. Ruining the world - and it's magic. Ruining her along with it. 

She heaves a breath, and then another. She is alone in an unfamiliar world again, with a body she cannot control and powers that she does not understand - 

"Miss?" She looks up. A child, just outside of the boundary of ripped dirt and grass. "Are you okay?" 

She liked children, she thinks. When all the other soldiers would flinch and look away from her, children never did. 

Terra pushes up from the ground, wipes her mouth. "I'm - fine." She lies. "Where are your parents?" Children should be with - the thought makes something shudder in her, makes her hair flash pink and white. 

The child - girl? - looks down. "I... I don't know, I was looking for my mom but -" 

Oh. 

The world has been torn apart. Wreckage scatters the horizon of a sky that's the wrong color. She can only imagine the dangers waiting in a world out of balance. 

Terra swallows. 

"I'll- help you look, okay?" The girl looks up again, and smiles. "Until we find somebody." 

It'll just be for a little while, she thinks. Eventually she'll be more danger than help, but... for a little while, she can stay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: I mean i'm never gonna work on these again I may as well post them
> 
> Me, immediately after: *has an idea for the next one* 
> 
> So it goes.


	6. mog

Moogles aren’t magic. They’re good at it, don’t get it wrong, but they’re not /made/ out of it.

What they’re made out of is /music/.

The cave of moogles freeze still as the world’s symphony screeches into a cacophony. Mog can feel the world breaking, ancient rhythms snarling up on themselves and tearing everything apart.

-Music is old, okay. Music is the heartbeat of life, music is the rhythms of sand and surf and sky, sun and moon, as old as the first mind that could understand the beat and dance along.

(That mind might have been a moogle. Can’t prove it wasn’t.)

Music /remembers/.

Mog knows what’s happened the same time the others realize it. The music remembers what it as like before. The echoes of the war of the goddesses have never really gone away, the tension held tight.

It’s – bad. It’s gonna be bad, and – some of the clan don’t make it, their songs ripped apart. Mog tries to remember the steps, but he can’t get them right.

The cave gets quieter, and quieter.

Mog thinks that he might be the only one left, but he doesn’t want to check.

One day, he’s gonna go out. Find the old songs, learn them and remember them. There would be music in the world, somewhere. There is always music.

Until then, he’s gonna – go check on Umaro, and wait. Rest, before the next turn in the dance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yep, this is still happening. 
> 
> can't believe i came up with moogle hcs for this.


	7. Cyan

Cyan wakes in the wreckage of a building, some foul beast sniffing at his wounds.

A quick swipe with his off hand is enough to discourage the monster, but it takes Cyan time to work his way out of the fallen boards and rocks. He steels his breath against the smell of rot in the air and does not try to find the source.

He emerges into a ruined world. Broken buildings and beasts and a sky colored wrong.

When he was courting his wife, he spent weeks folding paper flowers in the shape of the rare blooms she favored. They were paper, he explained to her, but they would last longer than live ones, and each one was made by his own hand, and he’d found the best paper in the kingdom–

He’d gotten halfway through his anxious explanation before she’d laughed and kissed him. She’d taken those paper flowers to their wedding and displayed them on their mantelpiece in a fine vase afterwards.

Until one day when their son was young and grabbed hold of them when both parents were distracted, and ripped a dozen of them apart in his hands.

It was no harm, truly, one of the risks of having a toddler – but still, the image comes to mind as Cyan looks at the ravaged world around him. Something precious torn apart carelessly, just for the sake of doing it.

He understands magic as little as he understands technology, but he understands the destruction of delicate things.

Someone has painted on the side of the building – the end of the world has come. Cyan ignores it.

The world had ended for Cyan when his family died, and he still continued on.

He would continue on now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look, writing these is the most dopamine i've had all week


	8. Gau

Gua wakes up alone in the wilds again. He's used to it. He should be okay.

The monsters are all different now, though.

Gau manages to avoid getting eaten while he heals up, but – it’s weird, none of the monsters are familiar, none of them understand him when he talks, and he nearly gets taken out a dozen times by monsters driven wild by some… sickness, he thinks.

The world smells weird, too, and water tastes wrong even when he thinks it’s safe. It’s not sick-wrong, but maybe rock-wrong, like licking a stone. But he’ll be okay. He will.

He misses his friends, though. He kind of thought they’d want to keep him.

It’s not really their fault, he decides after some time moping. Maybe they didn’t /try/ to get rid of him. The flying thing they were on had broken, and then everything was broken, so – maybe they were broken too.

They weren’t dead, though. Things weren’t that broken.

He’ll find them, he thinks. But he’ll figure out how the new monsters work, first, so that he can help them out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could have replicated Gau's speech patterns, but also, No.


	9. Umaro

Umaro has been the last one of his kind for a long time.

Years ago, he thawed out into a world much too warm and too loud, all of the others like him gone long ago. There were others he thought were like him, too small and too naked, but – they ran from him. And then they came back with pointed sticks and fire and then Umaro hid deeper in the mountains.

The only ones that didn’t try to attack him were the Moogles, little soft things that Umaro tried not to harm. In return, they hid him and shared their caves. One in particular takes the time to spend time with him, make sure he’s not alone. Umaro tries to learn gentleness, for Mog, but never quite manages dancing.

And then the world breaks, and the loud world gets very loud and then very silent, and Umaro is alone again.

Mog comes by, after a while, and Umaro roars with joy. Mog is safe and –

Mog smells like fear. Mog is – afraid of him, Mog is afraid like the others, Umaro is –

“No, no buddy, you’re okay, just.” Mog burrows himself into Umaro’s fur. “I’m okay and you’re okay and it’s gonna be.” Mog is shivering, pompom shaking. Umaro pats him as gently as he knows how. “Things are gonna be okay. Just stay safe, okay? I’ll come check on you, I promise.”

Umaro roars, and does his best to convey that Mog better stay safe too. Mog laughs.

He’s not alone, and that’s always been enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I did what I could.


	10. Gogo

The world cracks open around them and Gogo watches the way they have always watched.

Mirror mirror on the wall, they think, but this is a broken reflection now, this world is cracked and warped and pieces are missing. They watch, but they do not move from their cave.

It is only in the silence of the cave that Gogo can be something other than a mimic. It is only in this realm of isolation that they are able to carve away everyone else and find something that is them, but there is nothing there. It was a curiosity but now it's boring.

But the world has cracked open, and the isolation may not last. Already they can feel the ripples in the ground as other people find the reflections they left scattered around the cave. That's good. It's been a while since they've been anyone.

Gogo does not exist. Gogo is an illusion wrapped in other people’s cast-off fabric. They are a reflection and that is all.

They’re curious what they might start reflecting, now that the mirror is in pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *mutters rude things about themself for deciding to write about the sentient pile of rugs*


End file.
